Mustang Bio, a New York-headquartered clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company and a subsidiary of the biopharmaceutical company, Fortress Biotech, has signed a license agreement with Harvard University and a research collaboration agreement with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a Boston, Massachusetts-based hospital, for developing CRISPR/Cas9-enhanced chimeric antigen receptor therapies for treating cancer.

Under the licensing agreement with Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, technologies related to the development of off-the-shelf CAR T, as well as CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing platforms, will be used in conjunction with Mustang’s CAR T cell therapies for developing treatments for hematologic malignancies and solid tumors. The Harvard technologies were developed in the lab of Chad Cowan, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology and a principal investigator at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Under a separate collaboration agreement, Cowan will lead preclinical research programs at BIDMC, where he is an associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Source: Mustang Bio